Vesalius College responsive website

Vesalius College contacted us to re-build their existing website. An ongoing redesign in Drupal completely failed, and they had to move quickly to get the new website online before the next academic year, especially for new potential applicants.

The requirements were speed, simple way of inputting all content, a logical structure and working well on mobile devices. So, a lightweight, easy to navigate, responsive website. The project manager and I came up with a good solution in regards to IA (Information Architecture) and started building the wireframes directly in HTML, only three of them, leaving the detail pages open for later development. Main ideas were the homepage, the section pages, and some modules we could sprinkle in later on. In terms of widgets, promo-boxes or other boxes. This responsive, fluid, modular approach made it easy later on to revise some styling to one element and let it drip into the other blocks as well.

From a fairly blank & dull wireframe, color and functionality was added at the same time as the PM and the content team were structuring content and navigation. A very agile way of working cause you get immediate feedback on what works, what looks good, or what doesn’t and has to be rethought and redone. In two months time, and a serious illness in between, the site was delivered, bells and whistles.

Starting out with a static site as a design mockup, we literally enhanced progressively, while adding more dynamic controls in to the pages and templates. WordPress has again proven to be a very powerful tool, and some custom development made it very easy for the client’s communication department to manage.

Tom Hermans is a freelance webdesigner/developer with a great interest in technology, communication, arts & design and music. These are some of the websites, posters, logo's or other designs I produced, for various clients or companies I worked for.

Most sites are built with web standards, technologies like HTML5, PHP, CSS3 with WordPress as CMS. Last two years I tried to convince people also of the importance of mobile browsing and building their website according to the principles of future-proof responsive webdesign.